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Sunday, January 8, 2012

Rolex 24 Hours Of Daytona: Night Testing

There's something mesmerizing about driving under the lights. Daytona is not quite as bright as the Formula 1 night race in Singapore but what makes it exciting is that it's not equally as bright everywhere and the illumination changes depending on where you are on the track.

Your eyes need to adapt to these changing conditions, which is all part of endurance racing at night. It is much harder to judge the braking points and your field of vision narrows so much faster around you at night.

As a driver, you must be able to take a cat nap with all this commotion around (there is typically only 1 trailer per 4 drivers!), then be ready to drive at your best shortly after you wake up.

These great shots from last night's testing at Daytona really help get the event's atmosphere across!

4 comments:

This past June Patroon had to trade their normal 2 day event at WGI for a 1 day, "12 Hour" event just to accommodate the Mobil 1 Seat Swap event with Tony Stewart and Lewis Hamilton, which took place the day after our track day.

The 12 hours meant we got to drive until 8pm, which wasn't in the dark, but we did get to experience driving in low light conditions, and I was shocked at how difficult it was. I had a good scare coming into turn 10, where the low sun made it difficult to clearly see track out points that are key to staying on the track. I can't imagine having that difficulty in determining braking points, turn-in, apex, and the rest of it.

And yes, it was pretty cool sticking around to watch Stewart and Hamilton tip-toe around the track in the mist and unseasonably cold temps.